Counting, and What Happens After
by theKnowItAll
Summary: I thought I could beat the odds. I thought that numbers were simply numbers and fighting was a piece of theater, carefully scripted to every last drop of blood. And then I began counting. Fighting. And fighting, sometimes, is what gets you killed.


Disclaimer: None of the characters or situations mentioned belong to me. All credit is directed towards JK and her godliness.

This one-shot literally came from nowhere. It just happened. And don't worry, if you're wondering about Chapter 7 for Lonely Horrors, it's coming.

Eventually.

Note: This story received a high rating because of its themes. It's dark and depressing and just generally, all-around heavy. You have been warned.

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_"Separate we come, and separate we go,  
And this be it known, is all that we know." _

_- Conrad Aiken_

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**Counting, and What Happens After** **

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**Whoever invented war and whoever invented marriage must have been the same person, and he must have been a mathematician. 

War involves a lot of math and a marriage is very much like a war, so therefore a marriage involves a lot of math. Already, that's the Law of Syllogism.

There are always two sides, if you hadn't noticed. And I mean both in war and in marriage. Two sides. Sometimes it's unclear which side is the bad and which side is the good, but there has to be two different sides at all times, otherwise the balance is thrown off, the formula is incomplete, and nothing will get accomplished.

War and marriage are a lot like each other even without the math involved.

There are victories and defeats in both. The victories are always momentous, passionate, joyful, laughing, and the defeats are always solemn, devastating, quiet, unexpected.

Heartbreaking.

There are surprise attacks, unforeseen circumstances, spies waiting for you to make one fatal move. And there are casualties, a few almost every single day. The death of a passion or a person or a heart, or a dream. That's the saddest thing. It is not the marriage itself or the actual war that kills a person, but the battles fought within and in between.

Sometimes fighting back is what kills you.

I thought I could beat the odds. I thought that numbers were simply numbers and fighting was a piece of theater, carefully scripted to every last drop of blood.

That was before I myself became a number.

I used to be _one._ Just that, _one_, just as I wanted to be. Then I married, and suddenly I was _two_, and then I had a son, and I became _three_.

A woman. A wife. A mother. _Three._

Then he joined the Dark Lord. He lied, cheated, stole, killed, and I watched. He was put in jail, and I waited. He escaped, and I wept. He's still my husband.

An enemy. A criminal. A murderer. _Six._

"Mother," my son often says to me, "you don't know what you're doing! Just stay out of this – stay away from this – you don't know what you're doing, and even if you did, you wouldn't even count anyway…"

He doesn't see that I've been counting ever since the day I married his father. Counting, watching, waiting, calculating. Oh, my dear son, I've been counting even since before you were born.

He says nothing, and there are several seconds of silence. I count them off, one by one, as the clocks tick above us. One. Seven. Ninety-two. One hundred eleven. The minutesnever mean anything until you begin to count them, and by then they're already gone.

War is a lot like that. As soon as you remember what you're fighting for, it's too late. You can't go back and say that you were wrong. I sit on the cold tiles of my kitchen floor every morning, eyes red, face gaunt, fingers swollen, legs weary, ears alert, heart broken. I count the tiles on the floor and sometimes there are two hundred, sometimes two hundred twenty. It confuses me that I never get the same number when I count them. They are embedded in the floor. They can't move. How can their number change? I stare at the clock too, sometimes. I think a lot of people think that the clock is actually time itself. It ticks. We can see it. Everyone has one. It _must_ be time.

I've forgotten what time is. And war. I've forgotten what war is, and here I am sitting in the middle of two of them. Isn't that sad?

It's sad, and it's confusing. Just like aftermath. The name people give to the effects of a war. Where's the arithmetic there? There aren't two sides anymore, so the law of syllogism is gone. No one is divided after a war, and the deaths stop multiplying. If they haven't, then the war isn't over yet, though people may say it is. After war, statistics are null and void, troops don't need to be added somewhere to subtract from the violence elsewhere. The addition of troops only leads to the multiplication of violence, which leads to subtraction of lives, which leads to a percentage increase in despair and further division between enemies. Even between friends, families. People go down in powers of ten; victors foil the strategies of their enemies; only small fractions of people are spared the violence, but they hear about it anyway, and they draw graphs and diagrams and find the surface area of their towns to see when the violence will reach them, often not realizing that their calculations are incorrect, pointless. This math takes place during the war. During the battles. _During._ In between. Where is it afterwards? Where does it go?

My husband comes into the kitchen one morning as I'm sitting here, counting the tiles as I always do. "Stop that," he tells me.

"Why?" I ask him. One hundred forty-seven, one hundred forty-eight …

"I fear that you're losing your mind. You're driving yourself into some form of insanity and I demand that you stop it before …" He doesn't finish his sentence. Even as he speaks, his voice is careless, distant, unconcerned.

"I'm losing," I tell him. "I'm trying to figure out why … I don't understand."

He says nothing. He isn't looking at me.

"I'm lost," I tell him. "I'm stuck."

"If you continue on with this," he hisses, "you'll only get worse, and I won't know what to do with you."

He drops to his knees in front of me and takes me wildly by the shoulders, shaking me until I'm crying and we're looking into each other's eyes – an angry gray against an empty black.

"Listen to me," he growls, shaking me again, but I won't look away from him, "this is going to be over soon and we are going to be victorious! What else do you want me to do? To say? I am fighting a battle, a war, each and every day, just to keep this family alive! Look at me!" He releases me and throws a sleeve away from his arm so that I can see the Dark Mark emblazoned there in a fiery, sharp black. "Look at that! At what it's gotten me!"

"Look at what it's _cost_ you!" I yell frantically, hurrying up to my feet. This is suddenly very important. "Look at what you've lost!"

"I have lost nothing," he spits, looking disgusted and disinterested once more.

And I laugh at him, because he doesn't know how right he is. "You've lost _me_."

He glares at me, saying nothing.

"And I've lost you. Somewhere … somewhere, I lost count …"

"Lost count of what?"

And I laugh at him again, because suddenly this means everything in the world to me, and my heart is breaking all over again. "I lost count of the number of times you looked at me. There were too few to count, so I stopped. I lost count of the number of times you said my name, touched my hand, touched my face, touched my lips … I lost count of the number of times you turned away from me, of all the days I tried to look pretty for you, just so that you wouldn't turn away … and suddenly, when I was counting the tiles this morning, I got so, so scared, because I knew, I knew finally, after knowing for months, that I'd finally lost count of _them_ …"

"Them," he says dully, but I know that he's confused.

"_Them_," I say. "The things that made me fall in love with you."

His eyes harden, he lets out a snort, he turns his back on me, and he walks away. And I sink back to the floor.

It's funny how the reasons for starting a marriage or a war can get so easily lost within a few precious seconds. Just with one mistake. Maybe two. It's funny how most people lose count of something when there's too much of it to count, but how I never can do that. No matter how big the number, no matter how many times the amount of tiles will change, I'll remember how many there are, and I'll be able to keep track.

I lose count when there's nothing left to count in the first place.

He comes back into the doorway. He looks at me for a few minutes,and i begin tocry again.I bury my face in my hands as they shake,and I'm frightened and alone all at once, and he just looks at me. Heleans sideways against the door's frame, looking at me, and he says, "I am fighting a war."

And I look at him, and I say, "So am I."

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You know what to do. 


End file.
